The movie's pace flags a good deal once Bangladesh has been born in 1971, and the adult characters are much less interesting than their child counterparts, but there's enough here to entertain – and to send audiences back to the book.

Rushdie acts as a narrator, reminding the audience of the elegance of his prose, but he might have been better kept away from the screenplay. It can be very hard for an author to perform radical surgery to a deeply beloved novel, even in quest of a sleeker cinematic shape.

Deepa Mehta directs with well-meaning professionalism, but with none of the visual extravagance that Life of Pi has in spades. The tie-in edition of the novel announces that it's "Now A Major Motion Picture", but "major" is just what Midnight's Children isn't.

You wait a year for a film version of a Booker prize-winning magical realist novel largely concerned with people from the Indian subcontinent and widely considered to be unfilmable. Then suddenly two come along: Life of Pi and Midnight's Children. The lesser of the two, though a movie of ambition and distinction, Midnight's Children.

The film manages to rouse itself for a section that depicts the ferocious oppression of Indira Ghandi, an expressionistic passage that conveys brutality in an inchoate way. However, in awards season, when we are already overburdened by lengthy epics, Midnight’s Children makes you long for a shorter film, or the story of a small, younger country.